@pieman: "Nominate Pete Seeger for Nobel Peace Prize
PLEASE FORWARD EVERYWHERE
Folks, the wonderful Eleanor Walden in Berkeley has moved this effort from
the beginning, here's an update with a link to sign the petition and spread
the word! -G
Dear Petition Signer,
The petition to nominate Pete Seeger for a Nobel Peace Prize has grown
rapidly; there are over 7600 signatures and you are one of them. The
comments on the petition web page attest to how deeply Pete has touched our
lives, from our parents to our children and grandchildren, and
helped shape our sense of human responsibility.
In response to this initial outpouring of support, we have launched a new
website, specifically to support this campaign. While it is still under
development, we are asking you to take a look, and to publicize its
existence
to others who m ight want to support this campaign. The site can be reached
at:
<url>
We are actively seeking additional help in building this campaign. Of
particular
interest would be organization endorsements of the campaign that we can
publicize.
If you are involved in such an organization, please ask them to end orse
this
effort,
and have them send email to that effect to:
<email_address>
Another goal of ours is to collect additional materials to support this
campaign.
Because Pete is such a private person there is little besides what's on
his record jackets that fills in his life story. Everybody has a little
tale to tell about when they first met Pete or when he sang at their
camp or school. Others may have photographs of Pete or of activities he has
been
involved with. It would be nice to collect those memories. He is
essential to so many people.
Below are some of my thou ghts on this campaign that you might be able to
use in
convincing others to join in!
Eleanor Walden
<email_address>
==== some thoughts ====
The fact that Al Gore won the Peace Prize award this year encourages our
effort for Pete Seeger for 2008! I hope this recognition helps the
environmental movemen t and increases ways to protect the planet that is
our home. I hope it makes more of us aware of the chasm we endure
between rich and poor, between obscenely rich and obscenely poor. I am
also encouraged that it was through an art form, a film, that Al Gore
got his message around the world so quickly and won such acceptance. How
tired I am of having the arts referred to as "artsy/fartsy", how
insulting to have the Universities cut back programs in the
"humanities", and music and arts enhancement in grade schools be the
first to go for budget cuts.
The folk music revival movement that spread aroun d the world encouraged
young people to learn to play an instrument, give poetic voice to
political opinions, and find appreciation for the carriers of folk
tradition who had kept those jewels of music alive in their families and
communities. One of Pete's most important contributions to our
consciousness was that he always paid ho mage to the lineage of folk
traditions and was one of the first to see that folk music, was not cute
and quaint, but was a form of protest against oppression.
Pete Seeger is an ambassador for Peace and Social Justice and has been
over the course of his 88-year lifetime. His work shows up wherever you
look in the history of labor solidarity, growth of mass effort to end
the Vietnam war, ban of nuclear weapons, work for international
diplomacy, support of the Civil Rights Movement, for cleaning up the
Hudson River and for environmental responsibility in general. Pete knit
the world together with son gs from China, the Soviet Union, Israel,
Cuba, South Africa and Republican Spain. We learned that Crispus
Attucks, born a slave, was the first man to die at the opening of the
Revolutionary War, that the Farmer-Labor party in the mid-west had a
socialist philosophy that lasted well into the 20th century, we learned
that anti-slav ery movements were often inspired by songs that indicated
a map of escape, such as "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd," he popularized
many of the IWW songs that helped in CIO organizing, and spread the
Civil Rights Movement through promoting the SNCC Freedom Singers and
making songs such as "We Shall Overcome," known all over the world.
When subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and
Senator Joseph McCarthy, Pete defended himself on the basis of the First
Amendment, the right of an American citizen to free association, not the
Fifth Amendment, protection against self incrimination. When he w as
boycotted from earning a living and practicing his craft on a national
scale Pete appeared at union meetings, summer camps, Jr. High and High
Schools, and Colleges. His pay at times was as little as $5, but his
value was priceless!
Pete also had his mentors: among them Paul Robeson, who said: "The
Artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery..." It is time that a
cultural worker receives the acknowledgment that, as Bertolt Brecht
points out, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with
which to shape it." The cultural workers who know the power of the arts
for social and political change, also know how difficult it is to gain
recognition for cultural creation without either trivializing the art or
somehow qualifying for designation of "high art" selected by an elite.
Pete Seeger always held to the principals that people's music is not
only "good art" but is representational art through music. Thus "fo lk
music" was a living, vibrant form of culture.
Culture, in essence, means to honor our forbears. In the words of the
Eastern European writer Milan Kundera: " the struggle for people's power
is the struggle for memory and against forgetting". Pete's talent, sense
of decency, and inalterable belief in, as Anne Franke said, that, "at
heart, people are basically good", were uniquely his, but he has never
been alone in his work; the support of his wife Toshi and his family
gave him the opportunity to be all he could be. We all stand on Pete
Seeger's shoulders in a manner of speaking. We share Pete Seeger as a
"father" of cultural, social, and political movements, as much as we
share our parental DNA.
It is time that cultural work receives the recognition that the arts
have great influence and global reach, that it is not only a medium of
entertainment but of education, compassion and action. It is the desire
of the co mmittee that Pete Seeger be recognized as a beacon of integrity
and principle in a time, and in a country, more defined by the absence
of those qualities than by their honor.
Eleanor Walden
<url>
<email_address>
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Aron Pieman Kay
<url>
check out GIULIANI TOILET PAPER
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DEFEND THE BILL OF RIGHTS"
    @grunk576: "<quote>
Was he the uptight fuck who used to spend afternoons boning that Mary
Travers chick?
Gimme some truth!"
    @shimtest: "<quote>
So give the Peace Prize to a guy who once tried to silence Bob Dylan
with a hatchet?  No thanks..."
    @dgdevin: ""LidsvilleNine" <email_address> wrote in message 
news:<email_address>
<quote>
Some folks apparently don't remember it this way and think Seeger actually 
tried to unplug Dylan, but this is Seeger's version:
<url>
[quote] DK: How do you recall your objections to Dylan going electric?
PS: It was at Newport, 1965. I couldn't understand the words. I wanted to 
hear the words. It was a great song, "Maggie's Farm," and the sound was 
distorted. I ran over to the guy at the controls and shouted, "Fix the sound 
so you can hear the words." He hollered back, "This is the way they want 
it." I said "Damn it, if I had an axe, I'd cut the cable right now." But I 
melissa83@example.net. I was the MC, and I could have said to the part of the crowd 
that booed Bob, "you didn't boo Howlin' Wolf yesterday. He was electric!" 
Though I still prefer to hear Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are 
absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the 
twentieth century, to use my father's old term. [unquote]
**********
I don't know if threatening to cut a P.A. cable with an axe should 
disqualify him from getting the peace prize, I'd be more concerned about him 
backing Stalin when Stalin wanted peace with Hitler and then withdrawing his 
anti-war recording Songs For John Doe once Hitler and the Soviet Union were 
at war and the party line (Seeger was a member of the Communist Party at the 
time) shifted to backing the war effort.  He eventually admitted that he was 
wrong not to see Stalin for what he was and to have stayed silent on the 
crimes of the Communist regime, saying when he was in the U.S.S.R. he should 
have asked to see the gulags.
<url>
[quote] But in fact, Mr. Seeger, 87, made such statements years ago, at 
least as early as his 1993 book, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" In the 
book, he said in a 1995 interview with The New York Times Magazine, he had 
apologized "for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that 
Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader. " [unquote]
  Gotta give him credit for standing up to the Un-American Activities 
Committee however, that took guts. "
    @kpisces_at_speakeasy_dot_org: "Wrong newsgroup.  Take it on over to:
alt.government-heads-members-of-courts-professors-and-rectors-former-Peace-Prize-laureates.among-others
<url>
Forms, which amount to a personal and exclusive invitation, are sent
to about three thousand selected individuals to invite them to submit
nominations. For the peace prize, inquiries are sent to such people as
governments of states, members of international courts, professors and
rectors at university level, former Peace Prize laureates, current or
former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, among others."
    @steve: "<quote>
seeger bio how can i keep from singing
von schmidt in baby let me follow down
john cohen personal comm.
if we all held hands all around the world, two-thirds of us would be under 
water
____________________________________________
Steve Senderoff & Trish Vierling
"...Ya run your E string down oh, I don't know, about three frets...anyway,
it corresponds to the third note on the A string...here's ya tuning..."
                   .........Tommy Jarrell
<url>
"LidsvilleNine" <email_address> wrote in message 
news:<email_address>"
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